THE MlHADEO HILLS 103 



bricklaying, and with his help we soon began to get the 

 G6nds to turn out very respectable work indeed. No- 

 body knew how to turn an arch, however ; and I had to 

 evolve the idea of one out of my own consciousness, and 

 build the first over the fireplace myself. The Gonds were 

 immensely amused at the idea of the Koitor, or " men," as 

 they call themselves, dabbling in bricks and mortar, and 

 laughed and joked over it from morning till night. Regu- 

 lar industry, however, was not to be got from these 

 unreclaimed savages ; and there were seldom half of those 

 on the muster-roU actually present. Every now and 

 then, too, they would walk ofi in a body, and have a big 

 drink somewhere for a couple of days, returning and 

 setting to work the next morning without appearing to 

 think a word of explanation necessary. The height of 

 absurdity was reached when I imported a plough and a 

 pair of bullocks from below, and sent a Korkii to work 

 with them to plough up a piece of land for a garden. He 

 really made a sad bungle of it at first, having no concep- 

 tion of the business; and I had to set one of my peons, 

 who had followed the plough before he donned the badge 

 of office, to help him. In a little while, however, several 

 of the Korkiis because quite au fait at ploughing ; and an 

 acre or so of fine soil in the old bed of the tank was soon 

 fenced in, deeply ploughed, and prepared for gardening 

 operations at the commencement of the rainy season. 



For the next few weeks, my spare time was pleasantly 

 passed in exploring the neighbourhood of the hills and 

 their productions. I visited the Sal forest in the Dela- 

 kari vaUey to the east of Puchmurree. It was one of the 

 few forests in this part of the country which had till then 

 escaped destruction at the hands of the timber-speculator 

 or the dyha-cutting aborigine, being inaccessible to the 

 former from want of roads, and unsuited from its level 

 character and the size of the trees to the operations of 

 the latter. It, however, affords an example of one of the 

 great difficulties of growing large timber in the dry upland 

 regions of Central India. Though the trees bore every 

 appearance of being fully mature, their size was by no 

 means first-rate, the largest averaging no more than six 



